Friday, March 18, 2011

Recently a series of events prompted Verizon to pull out of plans to build a 900,000 square foot data center near Buffalo, New York. In the spirit of a few years back when people were cheerleading to have Google or Microsoft build a mega data center in their city or state, I would like to make the offer to Verizon -- Iowa would LOVE to have you build your data center here!!

There are a number of reasons why Iowa is the perfect place to build your data center. Here are a few highlights:

Tax incentives: Talk to Microsoft and Google first - they can explain the wonderfully accommodating business environment they encountered when building data centers here.

Cost of doing business is a major consideration for a company when selecting a state -- I submit to you the #1 pick for 2010 -- Iowa.

The Iowa Department of Economic Development has a wonderful site to assist with any and all needs in locating here. There is even an online tool you can use to build a report comparing Iowa against any other state in a number of categories.

All nine of Iowa's largest communities ranked on the Forbes Best Places for Business list.

Iowa is a very progressive state for a variety of renewable energy types.

Iowa has a nationally recognized education program.

Did I mention incredibly inexpensive power?!

If you were considering New York or Wyoming, Iowa is the perfect compromise:

For my final plea - I would like to offer my complete consulting services (for free) on site selection within the state. I have a number of ideas on where the perfect location will be and can help you get in touch with city and state government officials to talk about incentives and power companies to discuss requirements.

If it's not too late -- Please consider Iowa as theperfect place to build your new data center.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

There are just certain things in IT or the data center industry you don't want to hear - and fire and 'data loss' are two of them. There were a couple of lessons learned from fire and data loss stories recently and I post them here for just that reason - to learn from them.

The University of North Carolina Greensboro had one heck of a Friday last week. In a little under two hours they experienced two fires in the McNutt data center. After the first fire they were unable to determine the cause and staff investigating a short while later witnessed a server burst into flames, starting the alerts and emergency procedures all over again.

The root cause of the events was traced to a single server that overheated and likely burned up a wiring harness first (which produced the first event) and then continued to run until it blew up its power supply (which produced the second event). This was a new server that was not under load, and we believe this was caused by a manufacturer’s defect.

Managed Healthcare services provider Health Net notified their insurer earlier this week that 9 server drives were "missing" from their data center in Rancho Cordova, California. A California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) statement later confirmed that nearly 845,000 Health Net customers in California were impacted by the breach.... and that they will be investigating it. A statement from Health Net said:

"After a forensic analysis, Health Net has determined that personal information of some former and current Health Net members, employees and health care providers is on the drives, and may include names, addresses, health information, Social Security numbers and/or financial information."

There are certainly many case studies to learn from involving data breaches and in my opinion it builds the case for following ITIL guidelines and making sure your data center provider or IT staff are acutely tuned to their processes and operational excellence. The Ponemon Institute released a report recently on the U.S Cost of a data breach and stated that the cost "reached $214 per compromised record and averaged $7.2 million per data breach event."

Then there is the Cloud and security and data protection. As Alton Brown says - that's another show.

However - this article from ShareFile.com CEO Jesse Lipson on Forbes is very nice and discusses how safe your data is in the cloud and some key questions to ask vendors to ensure protection.